Josh climbed into the cab the next morning looking dead tired. He held a flimsy cardboard tray with two big foam cups of coffee. “What’s going on today?”

I took the coffee. It was a small gesture, maybe even a trivial one. It meant more to me than perhaps it should have. “Nothing’s going on,” I said. “Not until I get my money.”

He passed me an envelope that I didn’t inspect and threw on the dash. “To answer your question,” I said, “not much.” The truck lurched slowly out of the yard into the predawn darkness. “Sometimes the fun never starts.”

Josh closed his eyes. “Do you always have to be such an asshole?”

“I’m not being an asshole. I’m being colorful.”

From behind his closed eyelids, Josh said, “Yeah? Well, you’re a colorful asshole.”

“How’d your dinner with Bob and Missus Bob go last night?”

He moaned and blindly guided the coffee to his lips. After a sip, he swallowed hard. “Excruciating. Do you know how much genuine hardwood floors cost? I do. I will never forget. He told me three times. He told me everything three times while his wife just smiled. She has to be on some serious drugs.”

“I didn’t know she was ill.”

“Anti-Bob drugs. Or should be. When I get home the first thing I’m going to do is fall on my knees and kiss my wife’s feet. Then I’m going to kiss our little boy’s feet. I hate this fucking job.”

“I imagine you have to travel a lot.”

Neither one of us said anything for a minute or two. The coffee was listing dangerously to one side in his hand. He looked as if he might have fallen asleep. I lifted the cup from his hand and put it into the holder.

Sleepily, he continued. “I almost never have to travel. I stay in my shop and people come to me. I don’t know how I got talked into this. Never again.”

“You’re quitting show business?” I asked.

“What?”

“Whatever you call it. Television. The entertainment industry.”

Josh’s head jerked forward. He opened his eyes. “What?” He had the scared, disoriented expression of someone who has awakened suddenly in a public place. “Did I fall asleep?”

I didn’t know if he had or not. “You said something about staying in your shop. I guess that’s what you call your office? Oh, and you were kissing your wife’s feet,” I said. “You were slowly working your way up her dress while a choir of angels sang.”

He leaned back again and closed his eyes. “Fuck you, Ben.”

“Don’t piss me off,” I warned him. “Or I’ll throw your ass out in the desert.”

A minute or two passed before he answered. “Any time.” His breathing became regular and his head dropped to one side.

Mr. Josh Arrons, television producer, slept through fueling and the truck wash and went on sleeping through my first delivery. The truck was gaining speed on a long, straight piece of 117 when he awoke and stretched. “I think this will be my last day,” he said.

“Three-day minimum,” I reminded him.

“Right now I’d give you my kid and his college fund to never get into this truck again.”

“I’d have to pass on the kid,” I said. “You have any photos?”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and held it out in front of me. “Sometimes a man just gets lucky. Married eight years next month.”

The screen held a photo of a petite brunette in jeans and a powder-blue sweater. She was holding a small child, who had his fingers in her hair, and the two of them were laughing. They shared the same blue eyes that matched their mother’s sweater. Behind them an ocean sparkled. Josh took the phone away.

John and his cross appeared in the distance. We were closing on them fast. The bright eastern sun threw a disfigured shadow from the cross back toward us. Josh leaned slightly forward into the windshield, uncertain what he saw, or if he was seeing anything at all. We sped past John and his mobile cross. Josh’s head whipped around. “What the hell was that?”

“What?”

Josh’s eyes were fixed on his side mirror. “That!”

“What?” I said. We dropped into a slight hollow and began rising onto another straightaway. I made a big deal of looking into my side mirror. “I don’t see anything. What did you see?”

“Okay,” Josh said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. But when a Jew starts seeing Jesus carrying his cross through the desert, I’m telling you the apocalypse can’t be far off.”

A little ways down the road, I gave in. “It wasn’t Jesus,” I said.

Josh said he was relieved to hear it. “I didn’t think so. For one thing, Jesus is shorter and his hair is longer. That’s the way it is with all celebrities. They just don’t look the same when you meet them on the street.” Josh grinned at me. “So, who was the stunt double for Jesus?”

I had to give that one some thought. In a way, my telling him it wasn’t Jesus was enough. It was enough for me. As far as I knew, no one knew John’s last name, or his story. He had a past, as we all did, but it didn’t matter much. If it did matter, sooner or later such curiosity would end badly. What could I say about John and his cross and his seasonal wandering up and down 117?

Finally, I said all I could. “He’s just a religious nut.”

“That cross is huge!”

“It’s heavy, too,” I offered. “Solid oak.”

Josh thought for a moment. “What makes a man do something like that?”

It was another question that couldn’t be answered. I’d heard rumors, and the little bits and pieces John had volunteered during our imaginary roadside smokes. Even if I knew the details, I doubted they could sufficiently answer the question. That was the thing about curiosity, especially about people: the real questions never had answers that meant anything for very long. Pretty soon you had a batch of new questions.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “Even if you come back here. If you’re a decent man, it’s the decent thing to do.”

Josh nursed his cold coffee the rest of the morning without saying much. He wasn’t as alert as he had been the first day. His cell phone didn’t appear once. With my permission, he got out of the cab at the Rockmuse Shell.

We sat at a picnic table beneath a lone cottonwood and lunched on barbecued rattlesnake subs. It was all for the tourists, the few who wandered down 117. It was really chicken, which explained why so many people said, “It tastes like chicken.” Josh looked a little squeamish. It made him feel like an insider when I told him the truth. We washed the sandwiches down with venom punch, which was really Mountain Dew and Hawaiian Punch. The taste was appropriately terrible and as such seemed genuine enough.

Again it was only midafternoon when I finished my last delivery. Josh had been napping on and off since lunch. When he was awake he stared out at the passing desert, probably not thinking about the desert at all but the end of the day and returning to his son and wife.

The wind had kicked up. Tumbleweeds bounced across the road, and the sun baked the tar into sticky black ribbons. A particularly hard gust shook the trailer. I swerved over the centerline. It woke Josh up.

“Are we there yet?”

“This is the desert,” I said. “There is no there here.”

Once again, the cross loomed ahead on the highway. It wasn’t moving. Something didn’t look right.

Josh straightened up in his seat as I slowed. “What’s going on?”

I didn’t answer him. The cross was propped up at an odd angle far off the shoulder. A blue plastic tarp had been pulled over part of it to form a rough tent. The tarp’s ragged corners whipped back and forth in the wind. Protruding from beneath the tent were two pairs of legs. In quick order I had my rig off the road and was setting the brake even as I jumped from the cab. If there had been another vehicle on the road I would have been struck and killed in my haste to get to the cross. I couldn’t take my eyes off the legs.

My knees hit the hard dirt of the shoulder. I yanked the tarp back, afraid of what I might see. The feet of one set of legs were bare and bleeding, the socks nothing more than rags around the ankles. They were the feet of Duncan Lacey, though I recognized him by the calico hair and the red suspenders. Duncan’s face was burned by wind and sun into blistering sores. John was cradling Duncan’s head against his shoulder, trying to get him to drink from an old army canteen.

John held up his free left hand to keep me from speaking. Duncan opened his swollen eyelids. He acknowledged me with a smile, though considering the condition his face was in, particularly his lips, it would have been difficult to identify it as a smile. In a hoarse, guttural croak he began to sing “Happy Birthday.” John shook his head but didn’t try to stop him. When Duncan got to the part where he should have said my name, he paused and stumbled again into “Happy Birthday.” John coaxed him into taking a couple of sips of water and Duncan closed his eyes.

“What the hell happened?” I whispered.

John scooted out from around Duncan and gently positioned his shoulders against the cross before he motioned for me to back out from beneath the tarp.

“It’s Duncan Lacey,” he said. “Or what’s left of him. He came wandering out of the desert from the north. I couldn’t believe my eyes. God was looking after him, all right. Another few hours and he would have died.”

“I know who he is. How’d he get way out here? We have to be thirty miles from their place. How do you know who he is?”

John rubbed his big arms. “Last winter he and Fergus came to church a few times. They drove that old Jeep of theirs through the snow and icy wind.”

“Church?”

“Don’t look so surprised. We all feel a need to come before the Lord, Ben. And I got the feeling they had a greater need than most. Particularly Duncan. And that’s all I’m going to say.” John tipped his head toward Josh. “Who’s that?”

Josh was standing behind me. “I’m Josh Arrons.” Josh put out his hand and John took it in his. “Ben’s letting me ride along with him for a couple of days to see if I might like to try driving a truck.”

John raised a wild gray eyebrow, looking at me for confirmation.

“Something like that,” I said. I barked at Josh to get back to the truck.

“No,” John said. “We’ll need his help getting Duncan into your cab and back to his place. Fergus needs to look after him.”

Josh couldn’t hide his pleasure at having an ally, especially the man he’d seen hauling the cross. I was stuck.

“What about you?” I said to John.

“I’ll be fine. I can still get a few more miles in before nightfall. The sooner you get Duncan home, the better. I’m just glad the Lord gave me some of his work to do.”

John and I moved Duncan out from under the tarp and to his feet. His knees buckled and John threw him over his shoulders like so much sacked feed and carried him across the highway to the truck. I was tall and John was taller. I had a clear sense of just how tall John was as he towered above Duncan and steadied him with one big hand on his shoulder. He said a short prayer and made the sign of a cross above Duncan’s head.

“Okay, Ben,” he said, “let’s get him in.”

It took all three of us to get Duncan up and into the front seat of my truck. Duncan was short of stature, but dense with muscle. John soaked some rags in water and wrapped Duncan’s head and feet. He resembled a sleeping mummy by the time Josh squeezed by him and perched on the console.

“Shouldn’t we get him to a hospital?” Josh asked.

Maybe we should have. That wouldn’t be what either of the brothers would want. Duncan was suffering from exposure and heat exhaustion, if not heatstroke. The old saying about what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is a nice sentiment, but it isn’t true, not on 117. Out in the desert what doesn’t kill you just pisses you off and will probably kill you the next time.

There were endless opportunities for injury and death. Rockmuse hadn’t had a doctor since the mine closed, which left a few folks dead and a lot more pissed off, and nobody stronger. Generally, no one had health insurance or much money to pay for treatment, especially in a hospital. Only one of the McCauley kids had arrived in a hospital, and that was because Maureen went into labor during a rare family trip into Price. Self-reliance was the true faith on 117.

“No,” I said. “We shouldn’t.”

Josh didn’t say a word during the drive to the Lacey brothers’ place. He sprinkled water on the rags and a couple of times tried to get Duncan to sip from a water bottle.

Duncan’s jeans were torn out at the knees as if he’d been crawling, which I knew he had. His fingers were dirty and raw. I counted back the days since I had seen them both and calculated how long he might have been out in the desert. My best guess was no more than three days.

Contrary to popular opinion, without water, a few days is all you’ll have, and the third day you can’t tell your toes from your nose. Without water your muscles stop working and you can’t walk even if you have the energy. I was afraid of what we might find at the Lacey brothers’ place. Whatever had happened to Duncan might have also happened to Fergus. For all I knew, Duncan was the lucky one.

Josh tended Duncan. When Duncan moaned, he winced as if he could feel the pain himself. The edge of the water bottle against Duncan’s raw lips drew blood a couple of times. Josh patted the red away and moistened his lips. I’d seen people in worse shape than Duncan, but none better or more tenderly cared for. Though I wouldn’t have said so, I was grateful to have Josh along.

The truck bucked and banged along over the ruts on the road to the Lacey place. Josh did his best to keep Duncan comfortable. He put his arm around Duncan and held him close to absorb the blows.

I saw Fergus on horseback galloping at an intersecting course to ours. He pulled up next to the window and glanced past me to his brother. He did a quick double take when he saw Josh. He didn’t bother to speak. He rode alongside the truck the last couple hundred yards into their turnaround.

Fergus dismounted. “How bad is he?”

“Bad enough,” I answered. “He’ll probably live. You can thank the preacher for that. John just happened to be on 117 when he saw Duncan.”

It was my turn to hoist the man over my shoulder. Maybe Fergus could have done it, except that he didn’t appear to be in much better condition than his brother. I doubted he had eaten or slept much since his brother had disappeared. No doubt he’d been out searching day and night. I didn’t have to tell Josh to stay put. He slipped down into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut with only a nod to Fergus. Fergus took no notice of him. His concern for his brother outweighed anything else, even the presence of a stranger.

I’d never been inside the boxcars before. I was surprised. I’d been in contemporary tract homes that weren’t as comfortable, or as spacious. The interior had the feel of one of those cartoon Arab tents that held tennis courts and a swimming pool.

Fergus pointed me toward one of two twin beds at the far end of the boxcars. I walked past two tinted panoramic windows that had been cut out of the metal side of one of the boxcars. A sliding glass door had also been added. The view was north, out over a nice wooden deck and into unobstructed miles of desert filled with the slanting golden light of late afternoon. An awning covered most of the deck and helped to keep the heat down.

I lowered Duncan onto one of the twin beds. “You know what to do?”

Fergus stood quietly over his brother and didn’t answer me. I went back to my truck and brought back my first-aid kit. Fergus was sitting on the edge of his bed. Tears streamed down his sunburned cheeks.

“You need to rehydrate him,” I began. “Do it slowly. Warm water, not cold. If the water is too cold you could send him into shock. You have something to take his temperature with?”

Fergus stared at his brother and nodded.

“Take his temperature. Put him in a tub of tepid water. When you get his temperature back to near normal, then you can worry about the burns and blisters.” I set a tube of antibiotic and bandages on the nightstand between the two beds. “It’s going to take a while. Afterward he’s going to have a hell of a headache and a lot of pain. You got something for the pain?” I put a mostly full bottle with the supplies on the nightstand. “Here’s some ibuprofen.”

“Where are his boots?” he asked.

“He wasn’t wearing any when John found him.”

“Preach?” he asked.

“One and only,” I said.

He seemed relieved that it had been John and not someone else who had found his brother. “I woke up early in the morning a couple of days ago. He wasn’t in his bed. I waited until noon to start searching. He’s been acting strangely lately, but…” His voice caught and he turned his head away from me and coughed. “We can’t go to a doctor.”

“Can’t,” I said, “or won’t?”

I didn’t wait for him to answer. I didn’t really expect him to. I turned to leave. “Just stick close by him. If he gets away from you again, you won’t need a doctor.”

Fergus came suddenly to his feet and took my hand in a jerky shake. He was saying thank you, or trying his best.

I told him to tie a rope to one of Duncan’s belt loops. “And tie the other one to yourself. You need to get some sleep, too.”

Fergus found his voice. “You take credit cards?”

“What?”

Fergus twisted his own swollen lips into a painful smile.

I told him I’d check back in a day or two.

As I passed the windows again the angle gave me a clear view of a bright patch of close-cropped green grass. I turned back to Fergus. “Is that a putting green?”

Fergus looked up from his brother with an embarrassed smile. “It is. You know,” he said, “these days there are some prisons that have them.” He glanced down at his brother’s bandaged head. “It helps keep the inmates from going crazy.”